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Abstract
Between 1890 and 1893, two young Americans, Frank Swift Bourns and Dean Conant Worcester, travelled through the central and southern Philippines on a zoological expedition. In addition to collecting animal specimens, the two men took more than one hundred and fifty photographs. These photographs have not been given much attention by historians but they are an important set of images that help expand the understanding of photography in the Philippines in the late Spanish colonial era. This article discusses the circumstances surrounding the making of these images and provides a framework for interpreting their significance by applying the concept of the ‘photographic obsessions’ of Western explorers as defined and described by Willem van Schendel and his colleagues in the book The Chittagong Hill Tracts: Living in a Borderland.
Notes
1 See, for example, Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2000; Mark Rice, Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2014; and Benito M. Vergara, Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th Century Philippines, Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press 1995.
2 See Christopher Pinney, Photography and Anthropology, London: Reaktion Books 2011; and Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians, Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2005.
3 Dean C. Worcester, The Philippines Islands and Their People, New York: Macmillan & Co. 1898.
4 See http://www.filipiknow.net/oldest-photos-of-the-philippines/ (accessed 6 June 2016).
5 Gael Newton, ‘South-East Asia: Malaya, Singapore, and Philippines’, in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, ed. John Hannavy, London: Routledge 2013, 1315.
6 Gilles Massot, ‘Jules Itier and the Lagrené Mission’, History of Photography, 39:4 (November 2015), 327.
7 David Brody, Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism & Imperialism in the Philippines, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2010, 23.
8 Alexander Russell Webb, despatch of 5 January 1891. Despatches from the United States Consuls in Manila, Philippine Islands, 1817–1899, reel 5, General Records of the Department of State, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.
9 Gael Newton, personal correspondence (22 April 2016).
10 Corazón Alvina, Carmen Cerdeira, and Ion de la Riya, ‘Imagining a United Future’, trans. Robin Gill and Josephine Watson, in Juan Guardiola, El Imaginario Colonial: Fotografía en Filipinas durante el period español, 1860–1898, Madrid: Casa Asia 2006, 210.
11 Otto van den Muijzenberg, The Philippines Through European Lenses: Late 19th Century Photographs from the Meerkamp van Embden Collection, Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press 2008, 2.
12 The University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (UMMAA) houses all of the known negatives from the expedition. The University of Michigan’s Special Collections library has prints that have been digitised and made available online: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/s/sclphilimg?type=boolean;view=thumbnail;rgn1=;q1=phla* (accessed 24 October 2017). While there is significant overlap among these archives, each contains samples that are missing from at least one other archive.
13 Worcester was a member of the first and second Philippine commissions and served as Secretary of the Interior in the Philippines from 1901 to 1913. Bourns was a medical officer during the Spanish American War and organised the Board of Health in Manila in 1898, serving as its interim head in 1902. Both men used the connections they had made during the Menage Expedition to assist the US military in the Philippines.
14 Rodney J. Sullivan, Exemplar of Americanism: The Philippine Career of Dean C. Worcester, Ann Arbor, MI: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies 1991, 19.
15 ‘July 21, 1890’, Bulletin of the Minnesota Academy of Natural Sciences, 3:3 (1891), 302.
16 ‘The Menage Expedition’, Minneapolis Tribune (20 July 1890), 4.
17 Dean C. Worcester to Ellen Conant Worcester, 29 October 1889, Thetford Historical Society, VT, USA.
18 One caveat to this assertion is a photograph captioned ‘The Malecon drive, looking toward the Anda monument’ at the UMMAA (photograph number 58G043) that is dated to 1893. The photograph is not part of the Menage Expedition photographs at the Minneapolis Public Library. Given Bourns’s departure to Borneo, Worcester’s degree of illness and short stay in Manila in 1893, and the fact that several other photographs in the UMMAA collection are known to have been assigned incorrect dates, I view the 1893 date of this photograph with some scepticism. It is more likely that the photograph was taken in 1890 when Bourns and Worcester first arrived in the Philippines.
19 See, for example, Dean C. Worcester and Frank S. Bourns, ‘Spanish Rule in the Philippines’, The Cosmopolitan, XXIII:6 (October 1897), 587–600; and Worcester, Philippines Islands.
20 Brody, Visualizing American Empire, 23.
21 These cyanotypes were included in letters that Worcester sent to his mother in Thetford, VT. The Thetford Historical Society has an extensive collection of these letters. As far as this researcher has been able to determine, there are no existing archives of Bourns’s material.
22 There are both cyanotype prints and gelatin silver prints from the Menage Expedition in the Menage Expedition materials housed at the Minneapolis Public Library.
23 ‘April 20, 1894’, Bulletin of the Minnesota Academy of Natural Sciences, 4:1 (1910), 43.
24 ‘The Philippine Islands’, St. Paul Daily Globe (21 April 1894), 3.
25 Juan Guardiola, ‘The Colonial Imaginary’, in Guardiola, El Imaginario Colonial, 219.
26 Willem van Schendel, Wolfgang Mey, and Aditya Kumar Dewan, The Chittagong Hill Tracts: Living in a Borderland, Dhaka: University Press Limited 2001, 8. Of the five ‘photographic obsessions’ described in this book, Muijzenberg says that this one is least applicable to Southeast Asia. The Menage Expedition photographs suggest otherwise, at least in how Bourns and Worcester viewed Sulu.
27 Worcester, Philippine Islands, 197; original italics.
28 Ibid., 193.
29 Ibid., 194.
30 Ibid., 194–95.
31 Guardiola, ‘Colonial Imaginary’, 221.
32 Ibid, 218.
33 Dean C. Worcester, Index to Philippine Photographs, 310. Dean C. Worcester Collection of Philippine Photographs, Newberry Library, Chicago.
34 ‘Kodaked to Death’, St. Paul Daily Globe (17 January 1892), 1.
35 Van Schendel, Mey, and Dewan, Chittagong Hill Tracts, 9–11.
36 Sullivan, Exemplar of Americanism, 11. See also J. B. Steere, ‘Animals as Modified by Environment’, The Popular Science Monthly, XXXIII (June 1888), 243–49.
37 Worcester, Index, 63.
38 For more on Worcester’s racial classifications and hierarchies, see Rice, Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands, 33–35.
39 Worcester, Index, 63.
40 Worcester, Philippine Islands, 415.
41 Worcester, Index, 76.
42 Van Schendel, Mey, and Dewan, Chittagong Hill Tracts, 11.
43 Ibid., 14.
44 Ibid.
45 Dean C. Worcester to Ellen Conant Worcester, 29 June 1891, Thetford Historical Society.
46 Worcester, Philippine Islands, 182–83.
47 Dean C. Worcester to Ellen Conant Worcester, 28 September 1891, Thetford Historical Society.
48 Worcester, The Philippine Islands, 178. This building is the likely setting of the photograph seen in . I reach this conclusion by noting the similar board construction of this house to the one in the other photograph and the roadway and fenced field that is visible in both photographs. In addition, at the far side of the house a portion of fence can be glimpsed in this photograph. In the 28 September letter to his mother, Worcester called it ‘a nice house just outside the walls’ of the town.
49 Christopher Pinney writes about a different, although related, kind of volatility and indexical instability in colonial photography. Pinney, ‘Introduction: “How the Other Half …”’, in Photography’s Other Histories, ed. Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson, Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2003, 6–8.
50 On 12 August 1897, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, Worcester delivered ‘two elaborate papers illustrated by photographs, on the Tagbanua and the Mangyan tribes of the Phillipines [sic]’. Science (1 October 1897), 512. On 18 October 1897, Worcester gave an illustrated lecture before the Unity Club of Ann Arbor, Michigan, discussing the causes of the revolt against Spain. ‘The Philippine Islands’, Ann Arbor Argus (15 October 1897), 1.
51 Worcester and Bourns, ‘Spanish Rule in the Philippines’; and Dean C. Worcester, ‘The Malay Pirates of the Philippines With Observations from Personal Experience’, The Century Magazine, LVI: 5 (September 1898), 690–702.